Marketing versus Town Planning 3D Imagery for Projects

Quite often we get into a discussion with clients who ask us to only create interior imagery for their project because they already have the exteriors done previously for town planning purposes.

There are a couple of key points to remember.

The primary purpose of Town Planning 3D imagery is to effectively communicate to the council members, planners and residents what the development will look like. This is not necessarily the same as the Marketing Exterior 3D Imagery.

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For Town planning 3D artist impressions – it is not important to show cars, pretty lighting like you often see in 3D images or attractive people walking into the development. These images are often fairly dry with only the building and the landscaping accurately represented to showcase how the development will fit into the neighbourhood context.

Regularly the vantage point for the camera and the direction of the view used for Town Planning may be done in such a way so as to downplay certain elements of the development which on the other hand for Marketing purposes could well be the main selling feature of the development itself.

So for Marketing images – lots of features are emphasised for the prospective purchasers. Attractiveness of the entry foyer, views from the balconies, how the development is going to be prominent in the streetscape. All the potentially contentious elements which aren’t necessarily a good idea to posterise to the council representatives or constituents.

Another reason why not to use the same imagery is about how scale and layout of buildings is shown radically different with marketing or town planning 3D imagery.

Case Study

As a case study I wanted to demonstrate this with the following example.

We created the following imagery for a VCAT mediation session for a Planning application for one of our clients:

Having these images as evidence for how the development will be positioned in the local context was very effective and overall our clients succeeded in getting the permit which was great.

Then once they required 3D Marketing Imagery – they had a chat with us and our recommendation was to utilise the 3D model of the project and change the angle of the camera to a more aerial perspective to highlight entries to all the dwellings in the project rather than just showing streetscape perspectives of the development. Also to maximise the impact of the image – we suggested a night time render for a bit more oomph

The client agreed with our suggestions and so as a result we created the image you can see below: